


Between Beats

by incidental



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Grief/Mourning, Loss, Sisterly Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-15
Updated: 2015-09-15
Packaged: 2018-04-20 23:12:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4805774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incidental/pseuds/incidental
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carmilla's thoughts, feelings, and memories immediately following ep. 2x30.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between Beats

**Author's Note:**

> It took me several days to write this, because I know how it feels to lose a sister. I hope it means something to someone.

There was one benefit to being human, one they so rarely took into consideration and one that means so little until the moment, and then it means everything.

Carmilla could not remember the last time she felt angry blood rushing through her ears.

It’s such a small thing, seemingly inconsequential, the kind of experience one almost never focuses on except in cases of florid prose. But in her moments of greatest anger, of apex rage, she missed it—the sound, the sensation, the state of being that is wrapped in heat and violence and raw existence. It was so human, so alive, and in fact so often disregarded that only a handful of times in over three centuries of vampirism had she missed it at all. This was one of those.

During the nights she spent tangled in _that girl_ ’s arms, she could claim her heartbeat as her own, pretend it throbbed through her chest, coursed blood through her veins, pinked her cheeks. But now, storming through the dark, she has no thrashing against her ribs. Nothing to walk in step with, no drumline of retreat. There was only a cold, hollow silence, one she only recent dared hope to fill again.

She had grown accustomed to its absence before, when she never thought she could. It took years before she accepted her place perpetually between beats. She would grow accustomed to its absence again. Whether she wanted to or not.

She tripped over a tangle of roots and took it on the chin, falling into the cold, damp earth about a mile outside of the crater. She turned over and slumped against a black, unforgiving tree trunk, and let out a hellish shriek. It shredded the air, and she heard the soft thud of several songbirds falling dead from the trees around her. It was a power she had almost forgotten. 

“You will forget who you are for her,” Mattie had warned many nights ago—many years ago, actually, though it more or less blurred together after the first century. Carmilla remembered now; they were on the roof of the Chateau de Versailles, watching the stars circle through the night, sipping blood and vodka. 

“I won’t,” Carmilla disagreed stubbornly. She could feel her sister’s flat, disapproving stare without having to see it. She rolled her eyes and drained her glass.

“You’re blind to it,” Mattie continued to lecture. “You always have been, and you always will be. _Avez toujours votre coeur dans votre main._ It’s just your way.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Carmilla said. “But it doesn’t matter. _Was ich mache, ist meine Sache._ ” Mattie smirked.

“You always have your heart in your hand,” Mattie explained. “It’s a, oh, how do you say it… an idiom. An expression. You’re generous, kitty, but it’s killing you. You don’t know how to stop. But fine! Fine. Whatever you say,” she said, waving her off as though she were done with her, though Carmilla knew she hadn’t heard the end of it yet. That’s just not what sisters do.

Now, many years later, her sister’s words rung through her ears in lieu of blood:

“You always have your heart in your hand.” 

She picked up a dead swallow from the ground near her and stroked its small, soft head. His white belly stood out against the depth of the night. His breast was still, and she had done that. She felt suddenly crushed by a wave of immense regret—though it was not for loving Laura, not for holding her heart in her hand, not for hundreds of years of passion and pining and loss, and honestly, not really for the bird either. 

Mostly her chest ached for Mattie. For her sister. Her best friend. Perhaps the only person in her entire existence who ever loved her for exactly who and what she was. She ached for every midnight rooftop lecture and every time she rolled her eyes at her. For every pithy argument that quickly dissolved into laughter and chase. For the breathless screaming matches, and for the way she spent weeks sleeping outside with Carmilla after she emerged from the blood coffin, knowing her terror of confinement, taming her rabid fear. 

“I swore to the gods I was done sleeping in mud huts,” Mattie had joked on the third night, shivering in a wool blanket under a vast expanse of sky. It was the first time in almost a hundred years that Carmilla had laughed.

She tucked the small, dead creature under her chin, and wept.


End file.
